Implementing High Probability Selling – Where to Start?

The beginning? The end? Bits and pieces? All at once? Just the parts that are comfortable or make the most sense? Nowhere?

It takes a lot of time and effort and practice to learn how to do High Probability Selling (HPS). There are lots of ideas to unlearn, and lots of habits to drop.

Implementing all of HPS all at once has worked very well in the past, but most of our clients prefer to learn and apply it in steps, slowly and gradually over time.

The problem with gradually adopting HPS is that the transition period can be a negative experience for prospects and customers. Being subjected to pieces from sales methods that have conflicting purposes can make them wary. Some sales methods just don’t mix well.

It matters where you start. It matters because of what the prospect sees.

If you start at the beginning, and use High Probability Prospecting (with no attempt to influence, persuade, or entice), the prospect will initially have one idea of what kind of person you are and how you do business. If you then switch to using more traditional sales methods on the same prospect, they may decide that you can’t be trusted.

We don’t know if this is the real reason or not, but we do know that people have had extremely poor results when High Probability Prospecting was followed by traditional selling methods. If you’re going to use any parts of a sales process that is designed to get someone to buy, you’ll get better results by starting out with that process from the beginning of your interaction with a prospect. And once you switch to using HPS with the same prospect, stay with HPS all the way through the end.

For gradual implementation, we now believe that the best place to start using HPS is at the end of the sales process. And then add the step that comes before the end, and so on, all the way back to the beginning.